Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.

Sunday, June 03, 2018

Pay Your Own Taxes!

Bakersfield Sounds

Pay Your Own
Taxes!

Battling the Liberal Establishment

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

On the
spur of a moment, a run to the pine trees at Ruidoso seemed the thing to do.

That is
an unusual event around here. Duty calls so incessantly that seldom such a
departure is pulled off, but the Dodge was headed north on Highway 70 with the
intention of eating breakfast somewhere along the way. That somewhere turned
out to be Alamogordo, but, before the Las Cruces city limits were even reached,
Dwight was on Sirius radio playing and discussing the sounds of Bakersfield.

Yoakum’s
relationship with Buck Owens long ago vaulted him into the musical stratosphere
and satellite radio now seems to be posturing him for a full blown return to
the spotlight. That’s okay with us. It’s okay with Aunt Judy, too, whose
sophistication standing in stark juxtaposition with her loyalty to Dwight’s
music has always made us smile.

So, we
listened to Tommy Collins, Susan Raye, Tony Booth, Wynn Stewart, Leona Williams,
Merle, Buck and Dwight the entire ride. We smiled some more, but what can you
say?

For starters, long live country
music, but moreover . . . long live Bakersfield!

Battling the Liberal Establishment

When we first arrived as scared
kids to the streets of Bakersfield in the late summer of 1981, I believe the
sign on Highway 99 at the Rosedale Highway exit suggested there were 40,000
people making that Kern County town home. Of course, we weren’t totally alone
in that there were a half dozen other New Mexico State alums scattered around
the county all arriving about the same time. Like so many graduates of our land
grant university, we had to leave home to find a way to make a living. A few of
us worked together at places like Superior Farming Company, but all of us were,
in one way or the other, attached to the what the late great Norm Graham
described as the elegant dirt of Kern County.

Old Blue through and through,
Graham had developed a particular interest in NMSU grads with the arrival of
Chet Haines some years before. Chet had worked for him at the Travelers lending
money in the form of mortgage loans on that elegant dirt. Chet set a high bar,
but he did all of us a huge service. He was a great model to emulate. In
addition to his craft skills, he was a gentleman. Through time, people like Norm
began to notice and created several very key opportunities for us not the least
of which was his wise counsel.

Up the valley at a restaurant in
Tulare one day, he told me he had decided it certainly wasn’t the intelligence
factor that set us apart from our California educated agricultural peers, it
was something else. He concluded it was our work ethic. I told him it was
something even more basic.

“We are all scared to death of
failure and there are no life lines to our being.”

He sat there contemplating that
remark. We talked about that very thing several times over the years he was
part of our lives. In fact, the whole Bakersfield phenomenon is a corollary to
the same thing. There was no difference in our perspective than the arrival of
the great migration of Americans who arrived in the Golden Empire during and
following the Depression. The greater number of those folks arrived not on the
mission to find a handout, but with the intent to create a life of value.

Unlike any other place I have
witnessed, the community of Bakersfield and its simply amazing backdrop of God
given natural resources was open for business if you were willing to run fast
enough to stay up. It offered real opportunities, but that wasn’t new. That is always
the way it should be.

If they could avoid the
Steinbeck propensity to lump the measure of acquired wealth with evil, the
Depression hordes certainly did. Those who were persistent became successful in
their continued role as self-reliant people.

Those people also proved to be
confounding to the community organizers who arrived to create their tedious
view of Utopia.The “Okies” largely
rejected them. They paid their own way.

They had no life line nor did
they want one. In a renewed and historical sense, they demonstrated exactly
what the American experiment was all about.

Pay your Own Taxes

They paid their own way.

Certainly, the circumstances of
their lives before arriving in California in the greatest of migrations
demanded they do something before they starved to death, but they were never
looking for a handout. They were simply and desperately seeking the opportunity
to be self-sufficient and to live lives with some degree of honor. Let’s hope
that our society has not changed from the same fundamental principle.

Maybe it is past time to be
paying our own taxes.

Oh, yes, the great majority of
us pay our taxes consistently and on time, but fewer actually sit down each
month and write the check that constitutes the real investment we have in this
government. The great majority never feel the actual pinch of signing that monthly
check. Withholdings camouflage the process. What is pumped into Washington
never crosses the threshold of our checking accounts and our control. It is
funny money that never really existed.

That would change dramatically,
however, if that check was torn from the checkbook each month to be filled out,
signed, and sent to the tax collector. All of sudden, matters such as $70,000
tables at the FBI headquarters, $250,000 toilet installations on airplanes, and
studies funding the sex lives of Tibetan butterflies would assume a much
different perspective.

This government has demonstrated
it will not and cannot police its own excess. Only We, the people can fix that.

Stephen
L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “Signing monthly tax
installments has consequences.”

The 16th Amendment became law in Feb. of 1913 and congress passed a federal income tax in October of 1913, Did you know the 1913 tax statute authorized withholding the income tax "at the source", but due to public opposition that provision was repealed and that mandatory withholding was not authorized again until 1943? Do you know about all the deliberate misinformation and skulduggery by federal officials that led to the passage the Current Tax Payment Act of 1943? It is all there in the CATO Journal article Evolution of Federal Income Tax Withholding: The Machinery of Institutional Change which I have embedded below.

You can skip all the theoretical stuff and begin your history lesson on p. 367.